[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 4 (Monday, January 31, 2000)]
[Pages 172-178]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to a United States Conference of Mayors Breakfast Reception

January 28, 2000

    Thank you, and good morning, and welcome to the White House. I hope 
most of you are more awake than I am. [Laughter] But I will try--I had 
some remarks here that said that I wanted to amplify on my remarks last 
night, and I don't think that I will use that word. [Laughter]
    I want to thank my good friend
Wellington Webb--talking about getting 81 percent of the vote in Denver. 
You know, Denver has that sort of characteristic western independence. I 
always thought if anybody was in a position to get that much vote, there 
would be enough to say ``None of the above'' to keep that from 
happening. [Laughter] So it's quite a tribute to him.
    Mayor Coles, Mayor Morial. I want to thank Mayor Scholz from Quincy, 
Illinois. He is hosting me when we leave here. And there are 20,000 
people in the cold out there, so you can be sure I'll give a shorter 
speech today.
    I want to thank the members of the administration who are here--
Secretary Slater and

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Secretary Cuomo, General McCaffrey,
Mickey Ibarra. I want to thank Ben Johnson from our Office of One 
America; Lynn Cutler; and there may be many others here. But we love 
having the mayors here, because this is sort of a grassroots operation.
    And one of the things that I really worked hard to do--one of my 
mayors and my neighbor and friend, Pat Hays, from North Little Rock, 
Arkansas, is here--you know, to be Governor of Arkansas is like being 
mayor of kind of a nice size city. [Laughter] People accept--they expect 
you to run the store. And when they show up, they expect you to be 
there. And when they call, they expect you to return the call. And if 
they've got a problem, they expect you to send somebody to see to it. 
And if you don't, pretty soon you're looking for another job. [Laughter]
    We've really tried to create an atmosphere around here where all the 
people who work here, particularly people who never worked for elected 
officials before--the White House really wouldn't function without all 
these bright young people that come here and work, but many of them have 
not had the opportunity ever before in their lives to work for elected 
officials. And we try to make sure that they all remember, no matter 
what's going on around here, for whom we're working and what our mission 
is. And so when you come here and talk to us, it reminds us of that, and 
we're grateful.
    I have so many friends in this group. I can't help mentioning one, 
because he was a former member of my Cabinet, Lee Brown, the mayor of 
Houston. I'm glad to see you, and thank you for all you did for me, and 
all you're doing for Houston.
    I wanted to just make a couple of points briefly today. First, I 
wanted to mention some of the things that were mentioned in the State of 
the Union. Secretary Slater talked about high-speed rail, airline 
traffic--you know, I am committed, more than anything else, to improving 
commercial airline traffic this year, because in a year I'll be on it. 
[Laughter] And I want you to know I am on the job here. [Laughter] I 
probe every person who comes to see me about, was there a delay, was 
there a cancellation? You know, I am on this case. [Laughter]
    I want to make in a nutshell the point I tried to make last night, 
when I quoted that wonderful line from President Theodore Roosevelt at 
the beginning of the last century, that young people with a future 
always take the long look ahead. We have all this good economic news. 
This morning we got some more good news that our economy grew at an 
annual rate of 5.8 percent in the last 3 months of 1999. That's the 
fourth year in a row we've had growth of over 4 percent, with inflation 
the lowest in 30 years; 7 years of consecutive double-digit business 
investment growth--that's the longest investment growth on record. So 
this unbelievable recovery marches on.
    Now, for everybody in this room that's more or less my age or a 
little older--you know, I was talking to some of my friends last night 
after the speech, and I said, ``Look, the reason I feel so passionately 
that we should, A, take the long look ahead, and really say to 
ourselves, `This country's in good shape now. What do we know now, right 
now, are the inevitable challenges and the great opportunities facing us 
over the next 10, 20, 30 years, and why don't we now set the goal of 
meeting them, and then outline a plan to get there?' ''
    So I was reminding people last night. I said, ``You know, when I 
finished high school in 1964, we had--the country had been through 
President Kennedy's death, and it was very traumatic. But we still had 
very low unemployment. We had very good growth. We had almost no 
inflation. We still thought we could deal with the civil rights needs 
and demands and imperatives of our country in an orderly and legal way, 
and the country wouldn't come apart. And you know, we had this sense 
that we could get there.''
    And within 2 or 3 years, the country was coming apart at the seams. 
A President,
Lyndon Johnson, who passionately believed in civil rights, found his 
ability to make advances crippled by the controversies he faced over the 
war in Vietnam abroad and the civil rights crisis at home. And our 
country then went from turmoil to turmoil to turmoil. And it's taken us 
35 years to get an economy that is, frankly, even better than it was 
then, to have the advances we have in building our one America, and to 
be in this position again.

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    Now, anybody that's ever lived long enough knows two things: Number 
one, no condition, good or bad in life, lasts forever; that makes life 
interesting and challenging. The principle of surprise is always there. 
And when you pass an opportunity, you don't know how long you're going 
to have to wait for it to come around again. And the second thing that 
anybody that's over 30 years old has learned, one way or another, is 
that sometimes you make the worst mistakes in life when you think things 
are going along so well you don't have to worry about what you're doing, 
where you're going, whether to plan, and whether to make hard decisions. 
Nobody who's lived any length of years who can't remember a time in 
personal, family, business, or public life, when mistakes were made and 
opportunities were missed because things were going well.
    And that's why I tried to speak to the American people with such 
passion last night. We have waited a long time for our country to be in 
a position, because of our prosperity, to reach across party lines and 
regional and racial and all the other lines that divide us, to try to 
say, ``Okay, here we go. We're starting a new century. Now, it doesn't 
matter whether you're a Republican or a Democrat. We are going to double 
the number of people over 65 in the next 30 years, and a lot of us hope 
to be among them. You can't avoid that. It doesn't matter what your 
politics are. We've got the largest group of kids we ever had; they're 
from the most diverse backgrounds they've ever been. It's a meal ticket 
to the future if they all get an education, and if we can get rid of 
poverty among our kids.'' And I could go on and on.
    That's what I was trying to say last night. That is what you live 
every day. You get hired to show up and do something. But the further 
away you move from the grassroots, the more likely politics is to shift 
from deeds to words, partly because we're such a long way away from 
people we're trying to support and to empower. So you mayors, you can 
make a difference here. We don't want to miss this moment.
    And as I said last night, something else that you all know: No great 
goal is reached in a single step, but if you take steps toward that 
goal, you make a lot of progress.
    You all remember the story of the guy that had a mild heart attack, 
and it made him kind of goofy. And he went to the doctor, and the doctor 
said, ``You think you could walk 3 miles a day and get well? You know, 
you could really help yourself a lot.'' And he said, ``Well, I'll sure 
try.'' So he called him in a week, and he said, ``Well, Doc, I made it 
for a whole week. I walked 3 miles every day.'' And he said, ``But, 
honestly, I don't know what to do.'' And he said, ``Why?'' And he said, 
``Well, I'm 21 miles from home, and I don't know anybody here.'' 
[Laughter] You get a long way going step by step.
    So I want you to think about that today. And very briefly, let me 
ask your help on one or two things. I know that you saw the President of 
Colombia, who used to be one of your colleagues, and I'm sure General 
McCaffrey has talked to you about that, so I won't deal with that. But 
let me just mention one or two things. We've got to take this school 
construction issue seriously.
    Now, there is some--to be fair, there's more than politics here. 
Some Members of the Congress are genuinely reluctant to see the United 
States Government get involved in this issue because it has always been 
a State and local issue, and for some of our States, including mine when 
I was Governor, an entirely local issue. And we were--I think we had the 
third highest percentage of our school budget funded at the State--of 
any State in the country when I was Governor. But the problem is you've 
got these kids that are just pouring out of a lot of these schools.
    I've been to schools with a dozen trailers--a dozen--outside. You've 
got all these other schools, literally--I've been to schools that were 
too decrepit to wire for the Internet. And what I would like to do is to 
really see us jump-start this effort. And I know--you know what always 
happens. If we put some money in, then others are encouraged, and more 
people do it, and you get this thing going. And basically, to be able to 
do these kind of more urgent repairs on 5,000 schools a year, and then 
actually build or dramatically modernize 6,000 others, it would spark a 
whole wave of this across the country.
    There's lots of evidence that young children, especially from 
disadvantaged backgrounds, get a very bad signal if they show

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up at a school where the windows are broken, or they have to be boarded 
over, and it's dark and the paint is always peeling, and they can't get 
what other kids can do. I think this is a big deal, and I'd like to ask 
you to help us on that. I also hope--[applause]--thank you.
    I feel very strongly that it's--we're going to keep wiring these 
classrooms, and a lot of you have benefited from the E-rate program. But 
we've got to do more to train the teachers, because we've got to make 
sure we can make the most of it. That's very important. I hope you'll 
help me. I know this is quite popular in most of your communities--once 
again, double the after-school and the summer school programs. It makes 
a big difference.
    And if you have one of these GEAR UP programs in your community, you 
know that it's working quite well. We send college students in to mentor 
middle school kids who are disadvantaged, at risk, and we not only 
mentor them, we begin to tell them when they're 12, 13, 14 years old, 
what the present package of student aid is so they all know. A lot of 
these kids have no other earthly idea all the things that have been done 
in the last 5 years to increase scholarships and loans and work-study 
programs, and all this. If we can actually convince them that the money 
will be there for them to go, that's a powerful incentive for them to 
learn more and to stay in school and begin to aspire, to take their own 
long look ahead. So I want to ask you to help us on that.
    Secondly, I ask you to help us pass this new markets legislation and 
to increase the number of empowerment zones and to increase the EITC. 
One of the things that I didn't mention last night--I think that 
Secretary Cuomo has pioneered so many good things, but one thing I want 
to mention in particular are these housing vouchers that we use to help 
low income people move closer to their place of work. We've now done 
110,000 of them; in this budget we can more than double that. And I'd 
like to ask your help on that.
    Now, there are a lot of other things, and I'm sure Andrew went over 
the things in the HUD initiative, but there are a lot of great things 
that we can do to be better partners with you. But there are some things 
you can also do to be good partners with us; I'll just mention two. 
Because, again, we have a chance to dramatically cut poverty in America 
among our children. Child poverty is at a 21-year low; we can get it 
much, much lower. It's still unconscionably high in America.
    And I'd just like to mention two things if I might. Number one, we 
have a ton of working people in America who are eligible for the earned-
income tax credit who don't know it and don't claim it. Mayor Daley has 
launched an outreach program in Chicago because last year in Illinois he 
found in the State that $300 million in these credits went unclaimed to 
low income working people. Try it. See if you can get the data for your 
community, and let these working people know that they can do it.
    The second thing I'd like to say is, we set up the Children's Health 
Insurance Program to be designed and run by the States in the 1997 
Balanced Budget Act. So it took us a while to get it up and going, but 
last year we went from 1 to 2 million kids enrolled in a year. It took 
us a year and a half to get up to a million, and it was very 
frustrating, but now these programs are kicking in and we're up to 2 
million. The money is there to insure 5 million kids.
    You heard me say last night that I wanted to follow the Vice 
President's suggestion to let the working parents of these low income 
kids buy into the program. But they'll never get there if they don't 
have their kids enrolled in the first place, and they don't know that. 
So anything you can do, with all the organization and mechanisms and 
outreach that you have, to help us to get the enrollment in the CHIP 
program up, I would be profoundly grateful. It's very important. We've 
got to go from 2 to 5 million kids. If we go from 2 to 5 million kids, 
then you're looking at about 6\1/2\ million parents, we estimate, that 
we could enroll. And if we got that many enrolled, we'd have a quarter 
of all the uninsured in America would be covered by insurance. It would 
be a dramatic achievement.
    But it is in the nature of these things that you've got to reach out 
and do the enrollment. And because we're a free and open

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society, and a very mobile one, these things tend to be difficult.
    I also hope that you can convince--we found in State after State 
that there are a lot of working people who somehow feel that this would 
signal that they were going on welfare or going back to welfare, and 
they don't want to do that. And we need to send the right kind of signal 
out here about what this is, that these things were done by their 
National Government because they want to work. And if they want to work, 
they're entitled to raise their children out of poverty and to have 
these basic supports.
    There's also a bigger problem in enrollment in many places where 
people whose first language is not English. And the mayors are in a 
unique position to help us with that. So I would ask you to, when you go 
home, think about whether you can--you know, get the information from 
either the Federal or the State Governments on enrollment in the child 
health program and in the EITC, and whether there's anything you can do 
to alert more of your people to their eligibility and get them to claim 
it. I think it would be a very good thing.
    Third thing I want to say--I've got to do this, because I blew it 
twice last night--we are going to build more livable communities. 
[Laughter] That was weird. In my whole life, I've never mispronounced 
that word before last night. [Laughter] See what I'm saying? The element 
of surprise is always there. [Laughter]
    Denver's done a lot of work on the livable community issue with 
regard to brownfields, cleaning up around Stapleton Airport. And this is 
an issue, in different ways, for most of you. So again, I ask you to 
help us pass this. This is the sort of thing that really ought to be not 
a partisan issue either. So many communities are worried about 
preserving some sense of balance and harmony in transportation and 
saving some green spaces, development proceeds apace, or overcoming some 
environmental eyesore. And so I would like to ask you to help. I think 
it's very important.
    Last night I also proposed to create a permanent endowment to 
protect lands across the country as part of our lands legacy initiative. 
Half the fund would be dedicated to State and local conservation 
efforts, and we would have a--listen to this--a tenfold increase in the 
Urban Parks and Recreation Recovery program and a significant increase 
for our Urban and Community Forestry program. This is very important to 
me.
    When Rodney and I were back home in Arkansas and we had terrible 
economic problems in the Mississippi Delta, we picked the 11 hardest hit 
counties, and we spent endless hours out there doing grassroots 
meetings. It was astonishing the number of little towns that said to us, 
``Yes, we're having trouble economically, but we're most worried about 
our kids. Can't you give us some help with recreation?''
    And we developed this sort of basic blueprint plan for little city 
parks, that even very, very small towns could build. And we set up 
this--what would today look like a tiny grant program. And we were 
flooded with all these--I mean little towns, 200 people, 300 people, 500 
people, you know--asking for this money, because they had nothing to do 
for their children. So this urban initiative is a very important part of 
this lands legacy matter to me, because in the biggest urban 
neighborhoods, you still have the same issue. And parents want their 
children to have something positive to do, even before they want another 
job in the neighborhood. So I hope you'll help me pass this.
    And again, this is something that I hope will be way beyond 
partisanship this year. It's a small part of the budget, with a big 
benefit for your folks back home.
    Wellington mentioned the crime initiative. We know the Brady bill 
works. We know it does. The gun death rate is at a 30-year low, criminal 
gun death rate--30-year low. And we need to extend it to check at the 
gun shows, which occur mostly in rural areas and the urban flea markets, 
where people who couldn't get a gun at a registered store can get it. We 
do need to strengthen enforcement, because about one percent of our gun 
dealers do most of the damage to the law, insofar as gun dealers are 
doing it.
    And we need to add the 50,000 more police. You know, you all have 
done a wonderful job with this community policing program, and I thank 
you for it. We're coming back with another 50,000, and we're going to 
try

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to get the second round of appropriations for it this year. And we're 
trying to concentrate these forces in the areas of highest crime.
    But I will say again, you know, when I got here--and this is not me; 
this is all of you who did this, all we tried to do was give you the 
tools to do it, but--if I had come here 7 years ago and given a speech 
to you and said, ``Look, here's what my goal is: we're going to make 
America the safest big country in the world,'' you would have said, 
``That poor deluded guy. We're in for a long ride``--[laughter]--because 
people weren't even sure we could make the crime go down, much less stay 
down. But we've had 7 years in a row, now, and it keeps going down, 
because you know what to do. Your police departments know what to do. 
You know what to do.
    And if you know what to do and if we've proved we can get crime 
down, then we don't have any excuse to stop until this country's the 
safest big country in the world. So I ask you to help us with that.
    And finally I want to make a serious remark, although I was more 
serious than you know about the airline remark I made earlier. 
[Laughter] I want you to help us get these investments in advanced 
transportation technology. What I said last night was true--a lot of you 
probably read about the cars at the Detroit auto show that are getting 
70 and 80 miles a gallon, dual/fuel cars, direct fuel-injection engines. 
They're using more and more composite materials to design cars now that 
are 500 to 1,000 pounds lighter but do the same on damage tests as steel 
cars. It's a remarkable thing.
    And it is true--I wanted to explain what I said last night--this 
biofuel issue, not just ethanol made from corn, but you'll soon see 
fuels can be made from rice hulls and other agricultural byproducts or 
even grass fields. And essentially, what these scientists--the problem 
now is that the conversion ratio is not great: It takes 7 gallons of 
gasoline to make 8 gallons of ethanol. I mean, you're ahead but not 
much.
    And they're working on breaking the chemical barriers to efficient 
conversion, which was how we got gasoline from crude oil. It's the same 
sort of thing. The scientists that are working on this estimate that 
pretty soon they'll have a breakthrough that will allow them to make 8 
gallons of ethanol or other biofuel with 1 gallon of gasoline. Now, if 
you've got a car getting 70 miles a gallon, that means you're getting 
560 miles a gallon, if it can run on ethanol.
    So we have a chance to completely rewrite the transportation future 
of America, to dramatically reduce the one-third of our greenhouse gases 
that come out of transportation and do it without some crippling 
regulation or some astronomical tax. But we've got to have the money to 
do this research.
    We built a--well, we worked with the Home Builders, Andrew and with 
the Energy Department and others, to build a housing development, the 
Inland Empire in San Bernardino, right on the rail line coming out of 
L.A. And we told--for very low income working people, we said, ``If you 
buy a house here, we will guarantee you that your average power bills 
will be 40 percent lower than they would in a house of the same size 
anywhere else.'' And after 2 years, the average power bills are down 65 
percent, because of the new lighting, because of the new windows, 
because of the new insulation. I mean, this thing is going--but we've 
got to have the money to do the research.
    So that's a long way from being mayor, funding somebody's research, 
but it will change your lives and your ability to do your job if you'll 
help us. And it's especially important in high-speed rail.
    I do think, for reasons I don't entirely understand--maybe people 
have been caught in traffic jams--we've got a little more support for it 
than we did when I showed up here. I mean, I had Members of Congress 
come up to me and say, ``You're from Arkansas. Why do you care about 
high-speed rail?'' And I said, ``Well, I might want to go somewhere else 
someday.'' [Laughter] ``I might want to travel around.'' But really, 
we're getting more support. And I ask you for your help on this.
    Finally, let me say--a couple of you mentioned this to me going 
through the line, so I just want to reiterate. For the last several 
States of the Union, I always save whatever I have to say about one 
America until the end because it's the most important to me. And if 
somebody said to me today, ``Well,

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Mr. President, your time is up on this Earth, and you're not going to 
get to finish, but we'll give you one wish,'' I wouldn't wish for the 
continued economic expansion; I wouldn't wish for even giving everybody 
health insurance or anything. I'd wish to make America one America, 
because the American people will figure out how to solve everything 
else, if we can have the right kind of relations toward one another.
    You heard me tell that story--I got the Congress to laughing last 
night when I referred to what Dr. Ladner, the distinguished geneticist 
from Harvard, said about all people being genetically 99.9 percent the 
same. I just want to give you one more thing to think about because 
we've got a pretty diverse group here. Ladner said that not only are we 
99.9 percent the same, but that if you were to take 100 people each and 
4 different race groups--like 100 African-Americans, 100 Hispanics, 100 
Irish, 100 Jewish-Americans--the genetic differences among individuals 
within the group are greater than the genetic differences between the 
groups as a whole.
    I mean, it's really quite stunning. The different skin color, the 
different characteristics that we've all developed over many thousands 
of years for all kinds of reasons are literally contained in one-tenth 
of 1 percent of our genetic make-up. And it's a statistic that I've put 
out there on purpose, because I think you could tell--the Members of 
Congress, a lot of them, were shocked to hear that. [Laughter] They 
thought there was a Republican gene and a Democratic gene. [Laughter] 
And whichever party they were in, they were glad they got the right 
chip, you know. [Laughter]
    And so I hope--you can make a lot of jokes out of this, and you can 
have a lot of fun with it, and the more you laugh, the more you get it. 
[Laughter]
    So I ask you to remember that and to remember that you have people 
in this White House who believe in you and what you're doing, wish you 
well, and want to help.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 10:25 a.m. in the East Room at the White 
House. In his remarks, he referred to Mayor Wellington E. Webb of 
Denver, CO; Mayor H. Brent Coles of Boise, ID; Mayor Marc H. Morial of 
New Orleans, LA; Mayor Charles W. Scholz of Quincy, IL; Mayor Patrick 
Henry Hays of North Little Rock, AR; Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago, 
IL; President Andres Pastrana of Colombia; and Eric Lander, director, 
Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research.